Internet home of Evan May, author of The King in Darkness

After hitting Send

At the end of last week, I sent out the first significant piece of the new WIP to my Eager Volunteers to get some early feedback. And then started waiting.

I should make very clear that I totally expected to – among other things, it was a holiday weekend here in Canada, so the Volunteers had better things to do, I sent them a fairly sizable chunk of stuff to get through, and it’s extraordinarily generous of these wonderful people to give me their time to help make my writing better to begin with. I appreciate the heck out of it and it takes however long it takes.

However, that period from when I hit ‘Send’ until I first hear back is always a bit difficult. Time passes, for all the understandable reasons I just finished going through, and I start to wonder what the readers have thought of it. Because, as we’ve discussed, I am just a wee bit prone to self-criticize, and left alone to imagine what people may be thinking about what they’re reading, I tend to start to fill in a bunch of negative stuff. At this point I’m still quite excited about the project, but as soon as I submit even a part of my work for someone’s consideration, I do start to imagine just a bit too much about what the potential reaction is going to be.

I guess this may have gotten slightly worse after shopping King in Darkness to agents while I was trying to get it published – I sent it (or, at least, a pitch of it) out to a people and waited to hear if they liked it enough to work with it. I may have refreshed my Inbox a ridiculous number of times. In all those cases, when I heard back, it was in the negative. Some of them were encouraging negatives, but still, no-one wanted to say yes. Even prepared for it, that was difficult. I mean, you know this is how it works, everyone gets rejections, but they still sting a bit, or they did me, anyway. When I pitched the book to publishers at Can*Con, there was that moment between when I finished talking before anyone said anything where I sat and thought ‘That was awful, and they’re going to tell me to leave now’. Fortunately, one of those publishers decided they did want the book, but I’ll never forget that moment.

This even sort of happens with the writing circle I take part in – every session I read a little bit of what I’m working on, and when I finish there’s those few seconds before anyone says anything. Those seconds are, apparently, where all my doubts live. Oh god they hated it. They can’t believe I wrote that and they’re not sure how to say it.

It’s a wonderful gift, sharing my writing with people, it really is, and I don’t want to create the impression otherwise. I love to write and writing is so much better when people read it and tell me what they think. I imagine that’s true for most artists – there’s satisfaction in creation, but then also in sharing what you did with an audience. However, at the same time, it makes you vulnerable, because you put so much of yourself into your creation that you know it’s going to sting a bit if the audience – in my case, the readers – don’t appreciate it or think it’s good. And the thing is, of course people are entitled to react however they react and like what they like. I don’t hold any ill will towards the agents who passed on my book – they didn’t think they could do anything with it, and said so. But as with a lot of things, there is a difference between what you know and what you feel, at times. I would obviously love it if everyone who ever read my writing thought it was the best stuff ever. It will never happen. I suppose trying to get there is one motivation to keep working on my craft.

At least in some of these cases I do get to hear what the readers think of my work. There are really a lot of people, now, who have read King in Darkness that I have never heard from and I have no idea if they loved my book, or hated it. I hope they felt like it was at least worth their time to read it. I know for most of them I’ll never know what they thought, but when I think about that it’s at least a little frustrating. Was it good? Did you hate it?

Of course there’s no way to improve as a writer or grow as an author without sharing my work, and I don’t think I would want to anyway. It’s just that time after I hit ‘Send’, when my doubts can be particularly loud. So I’m always very grateful when i do get feedback, whether it’s the detailed, insightful stuff I get from my Eager Volunteers, or just ‘it was cool’. I appreciate that more the more I do this.

So if you’ve ever taken the time to let me know what you thought of something I wrote, if you wrote a review or rated King in Darkness on Goodreads or Amazon or where ever, thank you. And, you know, if you have a chance to let any artist whose work you’ve appreciated know, I imagine they’d be just as grateful.

[In the interests of full disclosure, the first of the Eager Volunteers sent me a response and it was, as usual, extremely helpful. They’re awesome.]